Canadian film director, Atom Egoyan, has selected the ancient village of Glanworth in Co Cork as the main Irish location for his film of Felicia's Journey.
Based on the eponymous novel by William Trevor, it tells the story of a young Irish woman who goes to England in search of the man whose child she is carrying. She fails to trace him but falls under the influence of an enigmatic, older man who has a sinister criminal past.
That role will be played by English actor Bob Hoskins.
Shooting in Ireland begins on September 22nd and the production team is expected to remain in Glanworth for nine days. Between 80 and 100 people will be brought in by Marquise Films Ltd, the production company whose Irish location manager is Naoise Barry. Most of the film will be shot in England.
The traffic implications for the tiny village of Glanworth are already being discussed with the local Garda superintendent.
As access to the village from one direction is via a 15th-century, 13-arched stone bridge wide enough for three horsemen abreast, traffic calming is going to be of paramount importance.
The restored Glanworth Mill will provide most of the opening scenes of the film. Lynn Glascoe and her husband, Emelyn Heaps, have transformed an old woollen mill on the banks of the Funcheon River into a country house hotel and restaurant, identifying each of the bedrooms by an author associated with the area.
From Anthony Trollope (half-tester bed and hunting prints) to Dervla Murphy (a howdah-like canopy), and from Canon Sheehan, Thomas Davis and Alice Taylor to Molly Keane, Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor.
When Egoyan and his designer, Jim Clay, toured Ireland last month in search of suitable locations they discovered Glanworth, found that William Trevor himself had visited Glanworth Mill only a few weeks earlier, and found too that a hardback copy of Felicia's Journey was on the library shelves.
These small coincidences contributed to a decision that is going to bring far-reaching fame to this village which, although easily reached from the main Cork-Dublin road near Fermoy, is unarguably off the beaten track.
Its anglicised name commemorates the foundation in 1475 of the Dominican abbey whose ruins are still perched on the cliff near the mill, but for centuries before that the ford across the river was the hub of a network of important routes fought over by rival clans all claiming descent from the druid Mogh Ruith.
The cairn at the summit of Corran Hill near Fermoy is said to mark his grave; in a cross-country axis lies the Bronze Age gallery grave of his wife at Labbacallee, just outside Glanworth.
Their daughter, Cliona, is said to have lived on the huge rock which dominates the village. On this massif was built the fortress of Dun Mallclaigh.
A 13th-century takeover by the Roche clan led to the development of the fort as a substantial castle, lost by the Roches after the Confederate wars and abandoned altogether in the early 18th century.
Its towers still stand high above the village, with one gable-end of the mill buried in the cliff (in fact the Seamus Murphy room has the cliff for its fourth wall). Below the precipice, the river is once again churned by the paddles of the restored mill-wheel.
While Glanworth is a prosperous village surrounded by the fertile plains of the Blackwater Valley, Naoise Barry will have to range a little widely to find all the accommodation he requires, although with Ballyvolane House in one direction and the recently-opened Castlehyde Hotel in the other, Marquise Films will have the pick of some of Ireland's most charming country properties.
The film is still casting some of its main roles, that of Felicia, in particular, unconfirmed as yet, but Egoyan, most recently Oscar-nominated for The Sweet Hereafter, has found in Glanworth exactly what he wants as the Irish background for Felicia's Journey.